From the candy-sweet ‘Sugar Plum Fairy’ to the glittering ‘Dance of the Reed Flutes,’ Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite is the musical epitome of sugar, snow, and sparkle. Our information to Tchaikovsky’s Christmas basic delves into the work’s historical past and divulges why Christmas simply wouldn’t be the identical with out it.
Why the title?
The Nutcracker Suite is a shiny little field of jewels made up of highlights from Tchaikovsky’s fairy story ballet The Nutcracker, which has grow to be a Christmas staple world wide: conductor Simon Rattle calls it “one of the great miracles in music.” The ballet’s title comes from a narrative, The Nutcracker And The Mouse King, written in 1814 by the German fantasy author ETA Hoffmann.
After the pair had labored collectively on The Sleeping Magnificence, the choreographer Marius Petipa labored with Tchaikovsky to write down the music for a brand new situation he had chosen and written out, based mostly on a model by Alexandre Dumas of Hoffmann’s story. Petipa instructed Tchaikovsky all the way down to the final element, together with the tempo and the variety of bars in every part.
The Nutcracker, a fairy story ballet in two acts, is centered round a younger lady’s Christmas Eve celebration and romantic awakening. She creeps downstairs to play along with her favourite current, a nutcracker, which involves life as a good-looking prince who whisks her off to the Land of Sweets. The ballet was first carried out on 18 December 1892 on the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg, Russia.
Tchaikovsky made a choice of eight musical highlights from The Nutcracker earlier than the ballet’s premiere, forming The Nutcracker Suite, which was carried out for the primary time on 7 March 1892 in St Petersburg. The Nutcracker Suite grew to become immediately widespread and was featured in Disney’s Fantasia.
Have to know
What has all the time struck folks about Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite is the astonishing sounds the composer will get from the orchestra – he brings the toys and sweets to life in music that in some way appears like glittering cut-glass, crystallized ginger, and spun sugar. One innovation was Tchaikovsky’s use of the celesta, the instrument you hear within the ‘Dance of the Sugar-Plum Fairy’ (Petipa mentioned he wished this dance to sound “like drops of water shooting from a fountain”). The celesta is a keyboard instrument whose hammers hit metallic plates, sounding just like however softer than a glockenspiel; Tchaikovsky had heard one in Paris in 1891 and requested his writer to purchase one, hoping to maintain it a secret in order that no different Russian would compose music for the instrument earlier than him.
Watch the brand new video for ‘Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy’
Watch the brand new video for ‘Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy’ impressed by basic vacation tales for youngsters, together with The Nutcracker and A Go to From St. Nicholas (also called The Evening Earlier than Christmas), during which “The children were nestled all snug in their beds, While visions of sugarplums danced in their heads.” The video, created by Tibetan-American artist Tenzin Yougyal, follows a younger boy named Leo (after Mstislav Leopoldovich Rostropovich), and a magical fairy as they journey by means of their goals on the evening earlier than Christmas. Throughout their great journey, they encounter the key, joyful dwelling of the dancing Sugar Plums.
Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite begins with an ‘Overture’ and ‘March’ earlier than shifting into dances from Act 2 of the ballet, which is about within the Land of Sweets. After the ‘Sugar Plum Fairy’s’ dance, we’ve got ‘Russian,’ ‘Arabian,’ ‘Chinese,’ and ‘Reed Flute’ dances – although the ‘Arabian’ one (which Rattle calls “absolutely heartbreaking – how the strings and oboe and cor anglais sing out over it”) is definitely based mostly on a Georgian cradle track. The Nutcracker Suite concludes with the well-known ‘Waltz Of The Flowers’ evoking magnificence and grandeur.
Many of the dances have a few ‘verses’ that use the identical tune, simply orchestrated in another way. Discover how Tchaikovsky retains the sound crystalline and clear when he makes use of the entire orchestra, as when there are only a couple of flutes taking part in.
What’s a sugar plum?
Good query. It’s a little bit spherical or plum-shaped candy with a tough sugar shell round a fruit, nut, seed, spice, or chocolate. They have been widespread from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, when the technical time period was “dragée” or “comfit” (certainly, the French title for our fairy is “La Fée Dragée.” M&Ms are a transparent descendant.
The place have I heard it earlier than?
Anybody over a sure age can be unable to listen to the ‘Dance of the Reed Pipes’ with out considering of Cadbury’s Fruit and Nut chocolate bars (the dance was featured in a few TV advertisements within the Seventies starring Frank Muir).
The ‘Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy’ has additionally been utilized in Christmas TV advertisements for the whole lot from Baileys to Barclaycard. After which there’s the carry music, ringtones, and maddening ‘on-hold’ cash spinners; Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite is nothing if not ubiquitous. However as Rattle says, “Bring it on. It survives absolutely anything.”
